PROVIDENCE – Seventeen years after helping to launch Brown University’s School of Public Health, Terrie Fox Wetle is stepping down as dean. A search for Wetle’s replacement is underway, according to a School of Public Health spokesperson.
In 2000, then-Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences Dr. Donald Marsh was recruiting Dr. Richard Besdine from the University of Connecticut’s medical school to be Brown’s first David S. Greer, M.D., Professor of Geriatric Medicine. Marsh created a tenured line in Brown’s department of community health to hire Wetle, Besdine’s wife, too. Wetle left her position as deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging to become Brown’s first associate dean of medicine for public health and public policy.
For more than a decade, Wetle worked with three university presidents, five provosts and four medical school deans, including Besdine, who served in an interim role from 2002-05. During that time, Wetle reported to then-Provost Robert Zimmer, who, along with Brown University President Ruth Simmons, approved the expansion plan that led to purchasing 121 South Main St., Providence, the school’s home, as well as developing master’s and doctoral programs and expanding the faculty.
During Wetle’s tenure, the number of undergraduate concentrators has doubled and that of both graduate students and tenure-track faculty has tripled, Brown reported, and enrollment in the master’s in public health program has increased eightfold. Now boasting four departments and 12 research centers, the nation’s third-youngest public health school ranks among the top 10 for NIH funding. Last year, on its first try, the school received accreditation from the Council on Education for Public Health.
Wetle has forged partnerships with a number of entities around the state. Last year, the R.I. Department of Health and the school launched a new collaboration in the RIDOH Academic Center, which is designed as a public health research and innovation hub.
“We were never about doing research in a vacuum,” Wetle said. “Yes, we do the research that provides the evidence, but we also work on translating that into policy and programs.”
That commitment to preventing disease and promoting health at the population level has led to systematic HIV testing of pregnant women, lead-paint remediation, fresh produce programs and the formation of an opioid-overdose prevention task force, in Rhode Island.
And, ongoing studies explore the connection between social media use and depression, for example, and between global warming and heat-related emergency-room visits. The school’s newest center will focus on child health, from pregnancy through young adulthood.
Without obligations as dean, Wetle will continue her work with the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics, the American Federation for Aging Research (of which she is a past president) and the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, and teach classes at Brown.
Nancy Kirsch is a PBN contributing writer.
